Pages

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Duggan Hiking Must Haves: Quinoa Tabbouleh

Doc and I love to take advantage of being so close to nature here in SwitzerFrance by hiking as often as we can. The hikes we now choose may be a little different from what we're used to since I'm pregnant, but one thing remains the same...

﻿

...we always bring some quinoa tabbouleh with us. This dish is the perfect mix of sweet, tangy and crunchy, and always gives us the energy to keep going after eating it. The original recipe that I used is here, but over the last year or so we've tweeked it. The tweeked version can be found below. We felt like it needed a bit more crunch to meet our tastes (we seriously always double everything!), but feel free to adjust the vegetable amounts according to your own liking.

Hiker's Best Friend: Quinoa Tabbouleh

Ingredients:

1 3/4 cups of water

1 cup of uncooked and rinsed quinoa

1 medium sized roma tomato, chopped

A handful of fresh parsley, chopped

1 carrot, peeled and chopped

1/4 cup of golden raisins

1/2 of a medium sized cucumber, chopped

Juice of 1 lemon

1 green onion, chopped

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1/4 teaspoon of ground pepper

Steps:

1. Quinoa has a coating on it that if left unwashed will produce a bitter taste. Use a fine mesh strainer to rinse the uncooked cup of quinoa under cold running water for a minute or so, washing the bitter coating off.

2. Once you've rinsed the quinoa, add it to a medium sized pot (I used a 2 3/4 quart sized cast iron Le Creuset dutch oven), along with the water. Bring the mixture to a boil. Once it is boiling, cover, lower the heat to medium-low, and allow to simmer for 20 minutes, or until the water is absorbed. For example, the water was absorbed after about 15 minutes on this last batch I made, so peek in around that time so you don't end up burning your quinoa...which or may or may not have happened recently to a person who shall remain nameless...

3. After the water is absorbed and you're staring at some beautiful, un-burnt, super good for you quinoa, remove the pot from heat and fluff the quinoa with a fork.

4. Stir in everything else. Yes, all of it! Just dump it in there. How easy is that, right?!

5. Let stand, covered, for an hour. Or until you're too hungry to wait anymore, which for me, today, was about 20 minutes. (Baby gets what baby wants...)

6. Serve it cold/room temperature. Or better yet, in a sweet to-go ware container, on the side of a mountain, staring out at a lake or a forest or hell even an urban park that you are imagining as a jungle (get it? I crack myself up!). Either way, get outside and take this along with you!